[squarefoot]

And 25 years ago there was that IBM card that allowed realtime voice recognition on a 486, no connection required. At the presentation I saw at IBM, the operator loaded a word processor, wrote a letter, saved it as an image, sent it as a fax, received it on a second machine and printed it without moving a finger. I also seem to remember one machine ran OS/2 Warp and the other one Windows. It wasn't that fast for sure, and she had to correct some errors, but the point is that if done on dedicated hardware (FPGAs?) the performance can be a lot higher than on software. A lot of powerful hardware can be fitted into those assistants, and unless they fully open source them, there's no way to know what they do and what they could do if instructed to.